THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE 
COMMUNITY 



AN ADDRESS BEFORE 



The Chester County Historical Sccif tv 
West Chester, Pa. 



BY 



GEORGE W. WICKERSHAM 

Attorney General of the United States 



Saturday, September 28, 1912 



THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE 
COMMUNITY 



AN ADDRESS BEFORE 



The Chester County Historical Society 
West Chester, Pa. 



BY 



GEORGE W. WICKERSHAM 

Attorney General of the United States 



Saturday, September 28, 1912 






l^^-^o^O 






THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE COMMUNITY. 



It was with especial pleasure that I accepted the 
invitation of the Chester County Historical Society 
to come here as your guest to-day. For, upwards 
of two hundred years ago, my lineal ancestor, 
Thomas Wickersham, a Quaker farmer, came from 
England and settled in this county, within a few 
miles of this spot. I have in my possession a copy 
of the certiftcate given to him by the monthly 
meeting of Friends at Horsham, Sussex County, 
England, which throws an interesting light on the 
times in which he lived, and furnishes me with a 
text for the few remarks which I shall make. This 
certificate was issued by the monthly meeting held 
at Horsham, in the County of Sussex, the nth of 
the seventh month of the year 1700. It is ad- 
dressed : 

"To all our faithful friends and brethren in 
Pennsylvania unto whom this may come, in 
the covenant of life, in the fellowship of the 
Gospel of Our Lord Jesus Christ and in unity 
of the one eternal spirit of our God." 

"And dear friends," it runs, "Whereas, 
Thomas Wickersham, of Belney, in Ye County 
of Sussex, farmer, with his wife and three 
children, members of our monthly meeting, 
hath an intention to cross the seas and go into 



Pennsylvania, and in order thereunto hath laid 
his intention before this monthly meeting ; and 
upon inquiry and consideration thereof wee, 
the said meeting, doe certifie that the said 
Thomas Wickersham is an honest man, and is 
in unity with faithful friends, and free of all 
engagements or incumbrances soe far as wee 
doe understand that may impead or hinder his 
intended voyage, soe wee grant this certificate, 
and doe most heartily desire the Lord's power 
and presence may attend them in this their 
undertaking, and to the end of their days. 
Amen." 

What a clear light this document sheds upon the 
interdependence which the Society of Friends es- 
tablished among its members ; an organization that 
made the interests and the business of every one 
of its number a matter of concern to all the others, 
but which excluded from consideration all out- 
siders. The world, to them then, and for nearly 
two centuries afterwards, was divided into two 
classes: "Friends," and "The world's people." 
There was much of strength in such a division of 
human society. A compact, self-satisfied organi- 
zation of men and women who agreed to be guided 
only by that inner light which God has kindled in 
the hearts of men to give them the light of the 
knowledge of the glory of God; acknowledging no 
dogma ; obedient to no priestly hierarchy ; meeting 
together to worship God in quiet, simple fashion, 



and not only drawn together for this highest pur- 
pose, but also co-operating in mutual aid and 
counsel with respect to all the enterprises of their 
lives, business as well as social, thus anticipating 
the motto of the later industrial organizations, "all 
for one, and one for all"; encouraging modest and 
simple demeanor, and eschewing the pomps and 
vanities of the world — with but a little broader 
human sympathy, how such an organization might 
have grown, and how wide-spread its influence 
would have been! Yet, with such growth, it is 
more than probable that it could not have retained 
its simple purity of morals, its serene adherence to 
principle without dogma ; and that it would not for 
so long a time have been the strong leaven that was 
such a powerful influence in the history of this 
Commonwealth . vSidney Fisher says of the Quakers : 

"They have the honor of being one of the 
few divisions of Christendom against which 
the charges of inhuman cruelty and selfish love 
of power cannot be brought."* 

To the aggressive methods of other sects and 
other nationalities, they presented passive but 
unyielding resistance, against which the waves of 
opposition broke in vain. The long history of the 
boundary disputes between Pennsylvania and 

*The Making of Pennsylvania, p. 54. 



Connecticut and with the Lords Baltimore is a 
marvelous record of the power of self-confidence 
and self-control. 

"For nearly a century", Mr. Fisher writes, 
"they" — the Penns and their Quaker consti- 
tuents — "followed every doubling and turning 
of the enemy with perfect good temper, perfect 
fairness, and inexhaustible patience. They 
never resorted to violence and they never 
retaliated for injuries. They were always 
ready to compromise, and yet they were always 
dignified. They secured the ablest and most 
astute counsellers, and their arguments were 
always well prepared and fortified, but always 
reasonable and never strained the truth or 
justice."* 

The English Quaker and the early German 
settler of Pennsylvania were each intensely indi- 
vidual, tenacious of his peculiar characteristics, 
and very slow to yield to the process of amalga- 
mation with each other, or with any other. Indeed 
it was the lot of Pennsylvania to be settled by a 
considerable number of separate groups of different 
nationalities and different creeds, who long pre- 
served intact their religion, their customs, and even 
their language. These elements did not fuse 
readily with one another, and to that fact some 
writers attribute the reproach that Pennsylvania 

*The Making of Pennsylvania, p. 364. 



has not shown any disposition to honor her reahy 
distinguished men. Sidney George Fisher, in his 
history of the "Making of Pennsylvania," com- 
ments upon the indifference of the State to the 
great achievements of Bayard Taylor, whom he 
rightly describes as Pennsylvania's "first great poet 
and its really gifted man of letters, of whom any 
Commonwealth might be proud." 

But however indifferent the State at large may 
be, here, in this his home county Bayard Taylor 
was honored in life, and his memory has been cher- 
ished since his death. 

To-day we are met to honor the memory of two 
illustrious sons of Pennsylvania — Bayard Taylor, 
journalist, traveler, poet, novelist and diplomatist; 
and Thomas Buchanan Read, painter and poet. 
Both were born in this county within three years 
of each other, each lived almost the same span of 
life, each illustrated in his life the irrepressible power 
of art over environment. 

The greatest reproach of Quakerism was that it 
afforded no scope for artistic development. It 
taught repression — not expression — of poetical 
thought and feeling. This was a strange charac- 
teristic of a people who professed to be guided by 
the inner light. For art is but the expression with 
pen or brush or chisel of the inner light or vision of 
the most beautiful works of God. It is but the 



8 

revelation of the truth of beauty, and the beauty 
of truth. Truth, as Robert Browning says, in 
Paracelsus, "is in ourselves, and to know rather 
consists in opening out a way whence the impris- 
oned splendor may escape, than in effecting entry 
for a light supposed to be without." Hence, 
Emerson says, "Poets are liberating gods. They 
are free and they make free." Our Quaker fore- 
bears stood for freedom of thought and action — 
but with certain limitations. The imagination of 
the poet and the artist knows no limitations. So 
the Quakers feared the poet, and disapproved of 
the artist. They were given, as Taylor wrote, " to 
preaching of rules, inflexible outlines of duty, 
seeing the sternness of life, but alas ! overlooking its 
graces." Yet not all the conventions of meetings 
or societies could repress the true poetic spirit when 
it was born. It burst through these humdrum 
bonds and soared aloft ; and it sent the poets forth 
into the world as liberating gods. 

"If happiness is a dead level of feeling," 
wrote Taylor to Mary Agnew in April, 1849, 
"I don't want to be happy. All experience, 
even the most terrible, ministers to my need of 
expression. Next to my craving for that love 
which thou hast satisfied, and which is the 
deepest and purest passion of my nature, is 
this need of poetic expression. It possesses 
me like a fever, and will not let me rest." 



It is needless to say that a nature like this could 
not long remain in the placid environment of the 
quiet Quaker village. So Bayard Taylor fared forth 
into the world, and wandered far, gathering that 
wisdom that comes only from a knowledge of men. 
Kipling speaks of the departed heroes gathered in 
that Walhall where the shade of his brother-in-law, 
Wolcott Ballestier, is welcomed, as "Gods, for 
they knew the hearts of men; men, for they 
stooped to fame." Of such was Bayard Taylor; 
and, as he wandered, his liberating muse caught a 
higher fervor. Egypt inspired its most rapturous 
expression; Germany opened to him its deepest 
wisdom, as he rendered into the English tongue the 
profound philosophy of Goethe's Faust. 

Before he was twenty-five years old Taylor wrote 
of his — 

"intense and almost (at times) heartbreaking 
longing for the delicious twilight of Italy, the 
shadow of Oriental palms, the clear snow 
peaks and sounding forests of Norway. It is 
with me an unfailing source of joy and the 
wildest poetic enthusiasm." 

This was written by a son of Pennsylvania soil, 
whose ancestors had been Pennsylvanians for many 
generations. Yet within him, struggling for ex- 
pression, was that "imprisoned splendor" which 
yearned for the sunlight and the glory of the East ; 



lO 

which longed to behold the perfection of beauty in 
nature and art, and to rejoice in and with it. How 
the East welcomed him as its own he has recorded 
in his " Poems of the Orient." 

"The Poet came to the land of the East, 

When Spring was in the air; 
The Earth was dressed for a wedding feast, 

So young she seemed, and fair; 
And the poet knew the land of the East, 

His soul was native there." 

Several years later, Miss Mitford wrote to him : 

"You seem to me not unlike an Arab your- 
self — frank, loyal, faithful, brave, generous, 
imaginative — and above all, nomadic. To 
keep you in one place would be like fixing a 
lark to the earth, or imprisoning a swallow." 

But nomadic as he was, he found his greatest 
happiness here among his own people in his much 
loved Cedarcroft; and it is pleasant to recall the 
fact that he was not without honor among his 
friends and neighbors, and that at the public wel- 
come tendered him on his return home in the 
autumn of 1874, he could say with truth: 

"The thorny chaplet of a slow probation 

Becomes the laurel Fate so long denied ; 
The form achieved smiles on the aspiration 
Anl dream is deed and Art is justified." 

Taylor recorded in an interesting letter to his 
fiancee his first meeting, in 1846, with Buchanan 



II 

Read, whom he describes as "a pale young man 
with tender blue eyes and a dreamy expression of 
countenance." This description aptly fits one's 
preconceived idea of the author of the charming 
lyric " Drifting." Such an one might well write : 

"My soul to-day 
Is far away 

Sailing the Vesuvian Bay. 
My winged boat 
A bird afloat 
Swims round the purple peaks remote." 

Read even at that time had something of a 
reputation as a painter. " Thou hast perhaps, seen 
something of his," Taylor wrote Mary Agnew. It 
is doubtful whether the present generation knows 
much of "The Story of Bethlehem" or "The Lost 
Pleiad," which were so famous in their day. 
Buchanan Read broke the home crysalis at an even 
earlier age than Bayard Taylor, and at seventeen 
went to Cincinnati to study sculpture which, how- 
ever, he soon exchanged for painting. Like Taylor, 
he felt the wander-call, and the tremendous appeal 
to the poetic imagination made by Italy and things 
Italian. As a poet he attained high rank in his 
day, and Coventry Patmore declared "The Closing 
Scene" to be "unquestionably the best American 
poem we have." He is known to Pennsylvanians 
generally as the author of "The Wagoner of the 
Alleghenies," but to Americans who were school- 



12 

boys between 1865 and 1880 he will be ever re- 
membered as the author of "Sheridan's Ride." 

Bayard Taylor and Buchanan Read each sought 
and found scope for the inspiration and development 
of his genius far from home. Unlike my ancestor, 
however, when the spirit of adventure impelled 
them forth, they did not lay their intentions before 
a Meeting of Friends for their consideration and 
advice. But as the English Quaker farmer, a 
century and a half earlier, came bringing letters of 
commendation from the meeting at home to those 
of the faith in the new land, so these young artists 
carried in their ardent souls that love of beauty, 
that keen sensitiveness to its manifestations, that 
yearning for freedom of expression that commended 
them to the whole great human brotherhood of 
artists in every land. 

As they went forth into the world then, so must 
we all do in this age of steam and electricity which 
have brought the ends of the earth more nearly 
together than were the extremes of this Common- 
wealth a century ago. 

The time is past when any sect or group of people 
can persist in physical or spiritual isolation from the 
communities about them. We are all affected by 
like conditions. Living as we must, in close mental 
and physical relation to each other, there springs 
up a more insistent duty upon every one towards 



13 

all others, and the neglect to perform this duty has 
consequences which are no less injurious to the 
community at large than its wrong performance. 

We are now going through a period of popular 
agitation and upheaval in which a large number of 
people are looking to a modification of our form of 
government, and the enactment and administration 
of laws by popular vote, as a means of curing all 
real and imagined civic ills. Long ago William 
Penn wrote that — 

"there is haidly one frame of government in 
the world so ill designed by its first founders 
that, in good hands, would not do well enough; 
and. Story tells us, the best, in ill hands, can 
do nothing that is great and good." 

So long as the greater number of the people con- 
cern themselves only with the selection of men to 
make laws and administer them, turning them out 
of ofhce if they do ill, and reelecting them if they 
do well, it is not of such vital importance that every 
qualified citizen shall actively participate in elec- 
tions ; but if our frames of government are to be so 
altered that constitutions and laws are to be made 
or unmade by mere majorities of those voting, and 
the acts and decisions of administrative officers are 
to be subjected to like control, and their tenure of 
office to hang upon the momentary fickleness of 
such popular decision, then every citizen has a right 



14 

to require of every other the affirmative exercise of 
his right to vote upon every such question. 

It has been well said that the most conservative 
form of government would be that which would 
require the affirmative vote of a clear majority of 
the qualified electorate to any change in an existing 
constitution. But the new movement respecting 
our government would place even the great funda- 
mental covenants of Magna Charta and the Bill 
of Rights at the hazard of mere majorities of those 
voting upon a proposition which should violate 
them. The right of the individual to enjoy and 
defend life and liberty; to acquire, possess and 
protect property and reputation, of pursuing his 
own happiness ; the right to worship Almighty God 
according to the dictates of his own conscience; 
freedom of speech, immunity from unreasonable 
search and seizure; the right of one accused of 
crime to be heard by himself and his counsel, to be 
fairly advised of the nature of the charge against 
him, to meet his accusers face to face, to have 
compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his 
favor, to reasonable bail, and to a speedy trial by 
a jury of his peers — all these, which a thousand 
years of civilization have made our heritage, are 
proposed to be placed at the hazard of a temporary 
voting majority, which may be a small minority 
of the qualified electorate. Of a truth, "eternal 



15 

vigilance is the price of liberty!" But if such a 
change in our institutions be demanded by our 
people; if on mature consideration they believe 
that our existing form of constitutional government 
has ceased to be an adequate vehicle for the expres- 
sion of the sober, deliberate judgment of the people, 
then it is the right of the people to change their 
institutions and their laws, and they will surely 
do so. 

But let us pause for a moment to consider what 
William Penn said: 

"Governments, like clocks, go from the 
motion men give them; and as governments 
are made and moved by men, so by them they 
are ruined too. Wherefore governments rather 
depend upon men than men upon govern- 
ments." 

There can be no power without responsibility. 
If our institutions be so modified that a mere 
majority of those voting may alter or make a con- 
stitution, or a law, or a decision; or choose or 
remove an ofhcer, or control his ofhcial conduct, it 
becomes a duty which every citizen owes to every 
other that he exercise this power, and do not leave 
the laws and institutions of his State or his country, 
and the rights of individuals, to the mercy of mere 
minority rule. The performance of this duty 
should be compelled by law, and its failure pun- 



i6 

ished by adequate penalty — and if persisted in, by 
loss of the franchise. The principle underlying the 
relation of the early Quakers to the Meeting should 
be applied to the relation between the individual 
voter and the Commonwealth. 

In the sudden recrudescence of eighteenth cen- 
tury ideas of democratic government which consti- 
tutes the extraordinary political phenomenon of 
American thought to-day, much has been made of 
the theory of popular participation in law making 
and law administering. But little attention seems 
to have been given to the corresponding obligations 
which should ever attend upon the enjoyment of 
power. Yet as early as 1789 in France, the prin- 
ciple of compulsory voting was proclaimed as the 
concomitant of the privilege of the suffrage. 

In declaring the obligation to vote, and in secur- 
ing it with appropriate penalties, says M. Felix 
Moreau,* a well known French juris consult, the law 
will restore sincerity to universal suffrage, to the 
majority and the minority their true values, to the 
Parliament the necessary prestige, and to the gov- 
ernment stability. For, he says: 

" What becomes of the Democratic principle, 
where is found the representative character of 
the public authority, when a considerable 
portion of the citizens neglect to exercise their 

*"Le Vote Obligatoire" Revue Politique et Parlementairie, 1896. 



^7 

suffrage? Is such a system sincere? Can one 
still speak of government of the people by the 
people, of National representation? Do these 
words correspond with reality and not merely 
disguise a fiction, a constitutional falsehood?" 

The principle of compulsory voting has been 
recognized and enforced in some of the munici- 
palities and in some of the Cantons in Switzerland. 
"It is a httle ridiculous", says a writer on Swiss 
institutions,* "to talk of legislation by the people, 
when more than half the citizens refuse to exercise 
their legislative rights." It is in a measure recog- 
nized in France and Denmark. In Belgium, the 
Constitution establishes the general principle of 
compulsory voting, though the legislature is autho- 
rized to admit certain exceptions. Failure to vote 
is punished with fine, increasing with successive 
offenses, and the fourth offense is attended with 
loss of the franchise, as well as of capacity to 
hold any office of honor, trust or profit, or to receive 
any civic distinction during a period of ten years. 
The result of these laws has been that between five 
and six per cent, only of the qualified electors failed 
to vote after their enactment, whereas, previously, 
from twenty-five per cent, upwards failed to exer- 
cise their right. f 

*DePloige, "Le Vote Obligatoire en Suisse." 

fOrban, "Le Droit Constitutionnelde la Belgique", Vol. II, p. 28. 



When one considers the difficulty experienced in 
almost every State of this Union, except at a Presi- 
dential election, in getting a majority of the quali- 
fied electorate to vote, if the number of questions 
submitted to popular determination is to be 
increased, it is surely the duty of the State to 
compel by the imposition of appropriate penalties 
all the qualified voters to give the Commonwealth 
the benefit of their affirmative decision with respect 
to those questions. 

Voting becomes a civic duty the performance of 
which the State has a right to compel. 

"To establish true Democracy", says an- 
other writer, "it is necessary to be consistent, 
and when an election or a voting takes place, 
the real sovereign must decide, and not only a 
section of the whole. Attendance at the 
polling booth ought to be as compulsory as it 
is in the case of juries or military service."* 

Liberty, as Mr. Moreau so truly says : 

" Liberty is only defended by those who love 
it, by those who appreciate its guarantees, and 
accept the duties which it imposes; the right 
of suffrage is among the guarantees and the 
duties of liberty." 

Our institutions have been builded upon the 
value of the individual man in the State. To pre- 

*Wuarin "Le Contribuable", p. 282. 



19 

serve that value they have bulwarked him against 
injustice and tyranny. They have protected the 
weak against the strong — the few against the many. 
The day seems to have come when the many must 
be protected against the few; at least when the 
individual must be protected against the neglect of 
many which "would expose him to the aggression 
of the few. 

" Any government is free to the people under 
it," said Penn, "where the laws rule and the 
people are a party to those laws." 

But it must be all, or the greater number of the 
people who so rule, for, "more than this is tyranny, 
oligarchy, or confusion." 



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